The Central line was a war crime.
Edwin had stood, briefly, on the steps down into Bank station, watching the rest of the world finish its yawn, and had considered showing the clear competence of a man who had at least one decision left in him for the day—that he should take a taxi home. The Reckoning had just nominated him as one of eleven people in the world capable of auditing reality, and he had, in his right pocket, a debit card. The taxi from Bank to Leyton on a snowy Tuesday night was, plausibly, the most defensible expense of his entire adult life.
Then he’d opened the Uber app, seen a forty-eight-pound surge price, and got the tube anyway, because some habits are stronger than the metaphysical adjustments of the universe.
The carriage was packed with people staring at things only they could see — private apocalypses displayed at eye level, glowing faintly in the dim tube light. A man in a Pret coat was crying in a controlled, businesslike way, while across from him a woman in scrubs was reading something hovering above her own left shoulder with an expression Edwin recognised, having recently worn it himself: the precise flat shock of someone looking at the receipt of their own life and discovering it itemised.
Edwin hovered near the doors and tried, with limited success, not to read other people’s ledgers.
It was difficult. Ledger Sight, the system had said. Passive. Which apparently meant it did not switch off, even when a man in front of him was glowing, clad in the writing of someone who had, twelve years ago, told a woman called Karen he would call her, and never had. The Footnote ran around his head like a halo: Outstanding social debt. Karen still occasionally hopes.
Edwin studied the floor.
He got off at Leyton, walked the eleven minutes to his flat through a snow that had given up on being snow and was now simply wet, and let himself in. His flat was a one-bed above a kebab shop called Emperor Kebab. The Emperor Kebab smelled faintly through the floorboards on a still day, and aggressively tonight. He liked it — it was one of the four reliable things in his life.
He hung up his coat, put the kettle on, and stood in his kitchen having a careful think.
The world was rearranging itself. The PM had still not made a statement, last he’d checked, although by the look of Edwin’s neighbour Mrs Akinwale, who was visible through the window across the courtyard sitting catatonic in front of her television, this was not for lack of trying. Twitter was a wall of red-brown ink screenshots, livestreams, and people having their entire personal lives audited in public. A man in Glasgow had walked into Stewart Street police station and confessed to a murder from 1987. The Treasury had, six minutes ago, suspended trading on the FTSE. A vicar in Dorset had locked himself in his church and was, by all accounts, refusing to come out, citing professional reasons.
Edwin made his tea.
He took the teabag out of the mug, held it up in front of him, and said, quietly, “Footnote.”
Nothing happened.
The kitchen offered no response, which seemed fair.
He tried again, this time without saying anything, instead just thinking the word at the teabag, projecting the precise intention of writing on it. Something settled, behind his eyes — a faint warmth at the top of his sternum.
At the teabag’s edge, in a thin, cursive script:
Tesco Brick Lane. Reduced. £0.40. Past best by two days.
Edwin laughed once, in his empty kitchen, and put the teabag in the bin.
He remained at his kitchen window, looking out at the council estate opposite. Snow was falling under sodium light, the pub on the corner was lit, the corner shop was lit, and the block of flats opposite had lit windows in roughly half its units. A woman was pulling curtains in flat 4B, and as she did, Edwin’s vision did an inappreciable unpleasant lurch, as if something in the world had refused to add up.
He thought, Discrepancy, and pointed with his entire attention.
The street outside lit up.
Three things flagged, in aged ink, written over the street like marker pen.
Above the corner shop, in tidy script: Laundering for: Maziar. Approximately £18,000/wk. Owner: aware. Wife: also aware. Neither happy.
Above the pub, in older, heavier writing: Soul-debt. 1873. Three generations unpaid. Tenant unaware. The building remembers.
And above flat 4B, in plain bold letters:
MISSING.
The window was lit, and the woman who had drawn the curtain was, by every other metric, physically inside the building. He watched her draw the curtain — he’d even noticed that the curtain had a titchy printed pattern of red flowers.
He glanced back at the corner shop. The owner was visible behind his counter, a scrawny man Edwin had been buying milk from for three years — a man who had once given him a free Twirl when Edwin had come in looking, by the man’s own account, like death warmed up. The Footnote above his shop read Owner: aware. Wife: also aware. Neither happy, and below that, in smaller writing, almost an afterthought: Wants out. Doesn’t know who to tell.
Edwin felt something shift in him — a sparse, specifically technical thing, like a column adding correctly for the first time.
Two and a half years at Hartwell & Crook. Two and a half years of finding errors no one cared about, reconciling files no one read, flagging accruals at the third paragraph of memos no one opened.
The Reckoning has measured your hours.
Right.
He watched flat 4b, for longer than was sensible, then picked up his phone and searched up the Reckoning Crimes Unit.
He found it, paused with his thumb hovering over the call icon, and wondered about Mrs Akinwale opposite him, catatonic in front of the news. The catatonic part, he understood now, was the correct response to all this. The world had broken open and was asking each of its inhabitants what they were going to do about it. The catatonia of Mrs Akinwale was the first honest answer.
Edwin’s, apparently, was going to be different.
He pressed the call icon.
It rang twice.
“RCU, DI Okonkwo speaking.”
The voice was calm and Black-British, slightly clipped, with an undertone that suggested its owner had been on the phone for the last four hours and had not yet eaten dinner.
“Hello. Sorry to bother you. My name’s Edwin Marsh. I’m—” He paused. “I think I might have a thing to report. I’m a Reconciler. Tier I. I, ah, I just got it. Tonight.”
There was a brief, telling silence on the other end.
“You’re a Reconciler.”
“Yes.”
“Mr Marsh, you understand we’ve had four hundred and eighty calls in this building since six o’clock from people claiming to be Reconcilers.”
“Right. Of course. I—”
“Your file’s already open.”
He stopped.
“My—”
“Rare-class files started coming through around six. Yours opened before you rang, and we’ve been waiting for you to notice.” A slight pause. “Quite a lot of you, frankly, do not ring.”
“Right.”
“It’s a small list,” she said. “What have you got?”
He told her about flat 4B. She took it down — he could hear her typing, rapid and accurate, the aggressive typing you only got from someone who had taken statements at a great many three-in-the-morning incidents and treated each one with the same bored professional courtesy. He told her about the corner shop, and she took that down too. He hesitated about the pub, on the basis that soul-debt 1873 was probably outside her remit.
“Probably,” she said, dryly, when he said so. “Tell me anyway.”
He told her.
“Right,” she said when he finished. “I’m going to send someone tonight to flat 4B. We’ve had a missing-person report on that address open since November. The mother insisted her daughter was in the flat. She isn’t. We searched the flat ten days ago. She isn’t. But the building’s ledger apparently disagrees, and we are now, as of about three hours ago, in the business of taking buildings’ opinions seriously.”
“Christ.”
“Yes.” A quick pause. “Stay in. Don’t go knocking. Reconcilers tend to be conspicuous to the wrong things, and tonight there are several wrong things in your borough. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have someone with you?”
“No.”
“Get someone with you, Mr Marsh. Tonight is not the night to be alone in a flat.”
He considered this.
“I’ll try.”
“Mr Marsh.”
“Yes.”
“You sound twelve.”
“I’m twenty-seven.”
“Mm,” she said, in the voice of a woman who had taken a great many statements from twenty-seven-year-old men and reserved judgement on most of them. “Goodnight, Mr Marsh.”
She hung up.
He waited with his phone in his hand until the pause stopped being useful, trying to work out which feeling was the strongest in him: the trivial electric one of having been taken seriously, or the slightly larger and embarrassingly adjacent one of having been spoken to like a person by a woman who sounded like she had her shit together to a degree that he did not.
He went back to the window and looked, again, at flat 4B. The light was still on. The curtain with the titchy printed red flowers was still drawn. He thought about the mother, somewhere, who had been going round telling people her daughter was inside the flat for nearly six weeks, and about how few people had believed her, and felt, briefly and clearly, the meagre anger of a man who had spent his whole career finding errors no one else had bothered to look for.
His phone buzzed. Lila Avery.
He picked up.
“Edwin,” she said. “What the fuck.”
[Stat Gain: Acuity +1]
[Acuity 15]
The system text wrote itself, briefly, in the air above his kitchen sink, and then dissolved. Edwin watched it dissolve while Lila kept talking.
“—and I’ve been on Twitter for the last hour and I’ve seen three hostage situations and a peer of the realm has just confessed live on Sky News to having had eight kids he didn’t tell anyone about, and I am, by the way, also a Witness, Tier I, which I’m quite chuffed about actually, and what the fuck have you got, Marsh.”
“Reconciler,” he said.
There was a silence.
“Don’t piss about, Edwin.”
“Tier I. Eleven of us in the world.”
The silence got longer.
“You—” said Lila Avery, of tax, twenty-seven, of Manchester, with a brother who picks locks for fun. “You absolute fucking dark horse.”
He put his back against his kitchen counter and slid, slowly, to the floor.
“Lila.”
“Yeah.”
“I might be in trouble.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I think we all are. Are you home?”
“Yes.”
“Stay there. I’ll be over in an hour. I’m bringing wine and I am going to make you tell me everything.”
She hung up.
Edwin sat on his kitchen floor and stared up at the ceiling. The Emperor Kebab, three feet below his floorboards, was loudly insisting on its own existence in a way that he found, just at the moment, an enormous comfort. For the first time in roughly eighteen months, he allowed himself to laugh in a way that was neither bitter nor managerial.
His phone buzzed again, almost immediately — a news alert.
Hartwell & Crook senior partner Henry Pike: missing. Family request privacy.
He stopped laughing. He stared at the ceiling for a full further minute, thinking about Pike’s office, the burning, the layers, debt that didn’t accrue without a great deal of nefarious effort. He mind went to the missing girl in flat 4B, and a corner shop laundering for a man called Maziar, and a pub that owed something it had not yet paid since 1873.
He thought, possessing the new and slightly shocking clarity of a man who had just been issued, that very evening, a class he was not yet remotely qualified for: *Henry Pike is going to die tonight, isn’t he?
With absolutely no idea how he knew, he shook his head and purged his mind.
Then he got to his feet, slowly, made a fresh cup of tea, sat on his sofa, and waited for Lila.
Outside his window, in flat 4B, the light went off.
